our Intentions
Witnessing and Supporting
Witnessing and testifying to the lived experiences of racism, racial discrimination, racial injustice, and microaggressions of all our members.
Supporting members in the pursuit of justice and reparations for experiences of racism, historical discrimination, and/or any form of professional maltreatment.
Supporting members to navigate and thrive in the white spaces of music therapy academia, training, and practice.
Space-Making and Honouring
Creating space for our presence, our stories, and our diverse forms of story-telling and music-making.
Honouring the multiplicity and diversity of each network member’s place of origin, sense of identity and home, intersectionality, and lived experience.
Making real space and time outside of the business-as-usual capitalist system to prioritise our healing, commune and connect.
Planning community events for therapists of colour.
Awakenings and Unlearnings
Waking up to the ways in which our external oppressions have been internalised: i.e. our internal racism, and implicit biases.
Waking up to our own complicity in systemic oppression and injustice and committing to confronting this in transformational ways–not just for ourselves and our communities, but particularly in service to the people we work with as therapists.
Unlearning the external narratives imposed upon us, to make space for our embodied, ancient wisdoms and ways of knowing and being to surface.
Reclaiming Music and Research
Reclaiming and honouring our ancient musical practices, and the connection between music and healing in authentic, embodied ways.
Reclaiming oral histories and creative methods as legitimate forms of research methodologies.
Reclaiming the authority of lived experience and collective knowledge generation and musical wisdom.
Committing the time to recover and restore ancient and Indigenous art forms and healing practices.
Supporting members in their own acts of reclaiming.